I'm not sure that VSTs are the best place to start replacing Garageband. The only audio algorithm which is troublesome is timestretching, for which libraries are available from SoundTouch (free but crap) to Elastique (expensive but good) ... I think the biggest challenge is the graphical manipulation.

Download a demo copy of something like Sony ACID and think about how you would replicate the timeline. Download a copy of Mixmeister Fusion and think about the same thing. If you can get it, try an older copy of Mixmeister Pro 6. By now you'll be getting a feeling for the types of graphical manipulation your users will expect.

Once you figure out ways to represent tracks (I'm talking about track transitions, mainly) the rest is easy.

HeWhoMustBeConfused
Thursday, November 23, 2006

Deleting …Approving …

PortAudio is great for cross-platform audio.

Audacity (garageband for windows & linux, just not quite as pretty), uses a combination of portaudio and wxWidgets.

If you're talking about making an open-source project, maybe you could just join the audacity project instead of starting your own. Or branch it if they don't like the garageband-clone direction, similar to how gimp has a photoshop clone branch (gimpshop). 90% of the changes would be in the UI, it shares the same basic feature set with garageband.

Audacity has nice visualization and many, many features.

If you're talking about doing a commercial product building on top of Audacity is not an option, of course.